Tomorrow marks five full months since we left on this sabbatical, and I am asking that same question everyone I know asks at least ten times a month: “Where did the time go?” I feel as though I am clinging desperately to some detritus bobbing and weaving on the tops of rapids in a raging river hurtling towards an encounter with something I can’t avoid, but am afraid to face.  That helpless inner image could not contrast more starkly with my surroundings: a quiet, bohemian apartment in the middle of Collioure, a few steps from the Mediterranean under a sky so deliciously soft and blue I want to scoop it out with a spoon and lick it up before it melts.

• 

• 

• 

• 

A few days after Melissa and I arrived, our friends Mike and Cindy, who had been travelling in France, joined us for five days.  They left several days ago and already the memories blur and mix.  I remember our excitement the day of their arrival, Melissa insisting we needed more flowers, and, more importantly, a new vase to put them in.  We will probably not be able to bring the vase home when we leave.  It will be an anonymous donation to our absentee landlord.  Who washes a rental car?  Who buys things for an apartment they don’t own?  

I remember getting caught up in Melissa’s enthusiasm and succumbing to her infectious insistence that I buy a beret and man-scarf to match her orange, country French skirt and matching orange bonnet so that we would be properly attired when we met Mike and Cindy’s incoming train.  I remember the look of delightful awe on Cindy’s face when we walked under the big stone arch and she took in the magnificent crescent beach and rolling indigo blue waters washing against the nine-hundred-year-old battlements and clock tower.  The sight makes me catch my breath still. 

• 

• 

The four of us settled quickly into our apartment.  Melissa and I took up residence in the fourth floor bedroom that opens onto the rooftop deck. Mike and Cindy moved into the bedroom two floors below us.  In the middle, we hung out in the kitchen/dining area with the French doors opened onto the precariously perched balcony that overlooks our narrow alley draped with curtains of jasmine, bougainvillea and ivy.  When the wind died down after our first day together, we took to the roof top balcony for happy hours, drinking Rosé and eating brie, blue cheese, chevre, toasted peanuts, olives and an array of aged ham sliced paper-thin, some of which we wrapped around ripe melons.  If there is a more sublime combination of salt and sweet, a more velvet feel of ripe melon and mouth-melting ham, I don’t want to know. I think it would kill me with bliss. 

• 

• 

• 

• 

As Melissa and Cindy dissolve into yet another spasm of laughter, Mike makes us all look up at the hilltops cultivated with vineyards, rising gracefully to a sky that has magically mutated from azure to cobalt to cerulean.  The ancient stones of St. Elme Fort in sharp relief against the horizon smolder like glowing embers in a dying fire.  To be in love for thirty years with Melissa, to be in love with friends who, like catalysts in a chemical reaction, produce still more joy from an experience saturated with joy, washes me with gratitude and opens a place so tender, so fragile and vulnerable it is hard even here to expose it. 

Our days with Mike and Cindy were both packed and mostly spontaneous.  One glorious day, Mike chartered a motorboat, which he piloted for us along the undulating coast, docking for the bulk of the day in a fabulous port with soaring cliffs and startlingly clear waters.  Before turning for home, we continued south because, as Mike said, Cindy is a “let’s see what’s around the next corner kind of person.” We made it to Spain before heading home. Cindy had never been in Spain before.

• 

• 

• 

On another day, we started walking along the coast until we landed at the next town in a restaurant with sangria.  Even the trudge home, drowsy with wine and food, seemed almost effortless, our conversations delightfully diverting us from the physical effort.  After dinner, Melissa and Cindy sat on the warm, rocky beach while Mike and I, suddenly twelve again, skipped stones or competed to be the first to hit the buoy.  We were middle-schoolers showing off for two cute girls.  When the lingering twilight finally turned the water to slate and our sailing rocks became invisible projectiles except for the splash in the otherwise quiet waters, we wandered slowly back to the apartment.  If it were not for the fatigue of walking almost eight miles that day, we could have stayed up all night. 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Five wonderful days of walks and food and laughter and shared intimate, precious thoughts blinked into memories too quickly eviscerated by that voracious, unrelenting nemesis — time.  

Melissa and I wanted to end our sabbatical rooted in a place for an extended period with no agenda, to sync with the indigenous rhythms, the ebbs and flows of an unfamiliar place. I suppose I hoped we would, for once, slow down time and discover the mystery and beauty of being fully present to the present.  Is such a miracle actually possible?  In every dissolving moment, there is the joy of being alive and the sadness of the moment lost.  

When Mike and Cindy left, Melissa and I clung ever more tightly to one another, missing our friends, wishing them well, yet deliciously happy in this terribly intimate space we have found together on this sabbatical, or that has found us.  I don’t know which way that works.  We ambled among the cobblestone streets poking our heads into the numerous art galleries, comparing our favorite pieces, imagining them hanging on a wall in our house.  In one small shop, the artist and gallery owner, a lively, short, beaming man launched into a delightful and informative “lesson” on Fauvism, a style of painting made famous by Matisse and others in the early twentieth century.

His monologue continued unabated for twenty minutes, focusing on the Fauvist’s desire to push the boundaries of colors and discovering how a color is not a thing unto itself.  Its brilliance, its very essence depends on and is influenced by the colors around it, not unlike the way we were influenced, enriched, made more bright by our time with Mike and Cindy.

A moment before we left, he slowed his pace as if suddenly aware that he had been sprinting through a lecture to complete strangers.  In a sudden, serious change of mood, he revealed to us that he suffered horribly from dyslexia.  Art was his way of relating to the world, but he became an artist, someone at peace with his dyslexia, when he discovered through his efforts to understand Fauvism, that he had to embrace the shadows in his life.  As he said, it is the shadows that give meaning to the colors. 

We walked home anticipating Josh’s arrival in a few days, again filling with the inexplicable joy of anticipating a reunion with a part of ourselves that is also somehow a remarkable, unique, independent self. 

According to Buddhism, time is an illusion, and every tangible thing is merely a mutable, finite form temporarily housing the true, interconnected nature of being.  In these past few days, and, indeed on this entire sabbatical, I am coming to understand and find my peace with the rapids of time.  The light and dark in each moment, the fleeting nature of grasping at the infinite, the unquenchable desire to know and describe the ineffable, all give way to the stillness of joy, a Matisse blue sky, the warmth of Melissa’s hand in mind, the laughter of friends, this moment of tender remembrance.